David Bazan made a gripping album about his break with Christianity and it was lauded by Christianity Today. There is this current within evangelicalism of viewing doubt as a form of spiritual maturity. Why would doubt—something that often ultimately leads to apostasy—be viewed as such a positive? Why would milling around the edge of the cliff be held in high esteem while actually going over the edge is met with such scorn?
I’m not so sure that it’s an undercurrent of “doubt,” but maybe more a valuing of investigative rigor. Evangelics I’ve met tend to lean towards fundamentalism, so they especially like apologetic explanations that validate conservative viewpoints on things like authorship and literalism. I think as adults are getting a little more aware of the information available to them on the web and podcasts and other places, they are gaining new insights from non-Evangelical (or post-Evangelical) sources on inerrancy, women in the church, and so on.
The proliferation of information is destabilizing in virtually any top-down context, and the church is no different. And I figure the thought process is that if someone maintains their faith, or even comes to faith, through a path of questioning or investigation, then it must be stronger than if it was more blindly accepted. It’s kind of like how a rich man who worked their way to it has more value in society than someone who inherited it.